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Paraphrased: "They'll ship with Ubuntu... support for other OS's is pending." Trouble is, unless it's an expensive custom OS, nothing out there is designed to handle multiple CPU/RAM/motherboard combinations in parallel very well yet.

I'd like to see VM-Ware or some Linux flavour come out with a clustering system that can share multiple essentially separate computers as if they were one unit, maybe using one specifically for the console/display/input tasks and assign the apps and/or VMs to the other systems. Put the unused ones into standby when they're not needed then bring them up quickly. And share multi-core processes across the different boards in some intelligent way. (e.g. One VM or program requires more computing power, that VM/program can run on multiple systems at the same time.)

Now, let multiple consoles share the same individual machines in a super-cluster, possibly distributed over a wide area, and handle the assignment of tasks seamlessly.

Wait, I think I just described what Google does. :-)

Now tie in thin-clients (or not-so-thin) to it so everyone in an organization can share network resources, computing power, etc. so that the graphics rendering department can use the spare cycles of the systems in the HR department...

Okay, I'm dreaming. Time to wake up.

Honestly, though, I think this is the way we're going to have to eventually go.

Paraphrased: "They'll ship with Ubuntu... support for other OS's is pending." Trouble is, unless it's an expensive custom OS, nothing out there is designed to handle multiple CPU/RAM/motherboard combinations in parallel very well yet.

I'd like to see VM-Ware or some Linux flavour come out with a clustering system that can share multiple essentially separate computers as if they were one unit, maybe using one specifically for the console/display/input tasks and assign the apps and/or VMs to the other systems. Put the unused ones into standby when they're not needed then bring them up quickly. And share multi-core processes across the different boards in some intelligent way. (e.g. One VM or program requires more computing power, that VM/program can run on multiple systems at the same time.)

Now, let multiple consoles share the same individual machines in a super-cluster, possibly distributed over a wide area, and handle the assignment of tasks seamlessly.

Honestly, though, I think this is the way we're going to have to eventually go.

We are a long way from merging the concepts of cloud and grid clustering together. It is theoretically possible but the two have such incredibly different approaches that no one has a plan for putting them together yet. One works around inter-system bottlenecks, the other leverages them.

Very rare than a single OS would need to span multiple systems, though. Not very practical compared to just scaling up that one system.